The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by bio-accident and social-chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

Yankee Clowns: Venezuelan Clown Born By Yankee Clowns

The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader

Juan
Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s
elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy,
he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of
destabilization.

By Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal

Before the fateful day of January 22, fewer than one in five
Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the
35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically marginal far-right
group closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in
his own party, Guaidó had been a mid-level figure in the
opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now held under contempt
according to Venezuela’s constitution.

But after a single phone call from
from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president
of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a
previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the
international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the
world’s largest oil reserves.

Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board hailed
Guaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a “refreshing style and
vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News editorial
board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a
new democratic leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations,
Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as
the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

While Guaidó seemed to have
materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a
decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change
factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó
was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government,
destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a
minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly
demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.

“Juan Guaidó is a character that has
been created for this circumstance,” Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian
sociologist and leading chronicler of Venezuelan politics, told The Grayzone.
“It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several
elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between
laughable and worrying.”

Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan
journalist and writer for the investigative outlet Misión Verdad,
agreed: “Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside,
especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera
remarked to The Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably
right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”

While Guaidó is today sold as the
face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent
faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning
himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another.
His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held
partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.

“‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,” wrote Luis
Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster. According to León, Guaidó’s
party remains isolated because the majority of the population “does not
want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”

But this is precisely why Guaidó was
selected by Washington: He is not expected to lead Venezuela toward
democracy, but to collapse a country that for the past two decades has
been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals
the culmination of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust
socialist experiment.

Targeting the “troika of tyranny”

Since the 1998 election of Hugo
Chávez, the United States has fought to restore control over Venezuela
and is vast oil reserves. Chávez’s socialist programs may have
redistributed the country’s wealth and helped lift millions out of
poverty, but they also earned him a target on his back.

In 2002, Venezuela’s right-wing
opposition briefly ousted Chávez with US support and recognition, before
the military restored his presidency following a mass popular
mobilization. Throughout the administrations of US Presidents George W.
Bush and Barack Obama, Chávez survived numerous assassination plots,
before succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has survivedthree attempts on his life.

The Trump administration immediately
elevated Venezuela to the top of Washington’s regime change target list,
branding it the leader of a “troika of tyranny.” Last year, Trump’s national security team attempted to recruit members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort failed.

According to the Venezuelan
government, the US was also involved in a plot, codenamed Operation
Constitution, to capture Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace;
and another, called Operation Armageddon, to assassinate him at a military parade in July 2017. Just over a year later, exiled opposition leaders tried and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs during a military parade in Caracas.

More than a decade before these
intrigues, a group of right-wing opposition students were hand-selected
and groomed by an elite US-funded regime change training academy to
topple Venezuela’s government and restore the neoliberal order.

Training from the “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions”

On October 5, 2005, with Chávez’s
popularity at its peak and his government planning sweeping socialist
programs, five Venezuelan “student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to begin training for an insurrection.

The students had arrived from
Venezuela courtesy of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and
Strategies, or CANVAS. This group is funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy,
a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of
promoting regime change; and offshoots like the International Republican
Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International
Affairs. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic
in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance”
in Serbian, was the student group that gained international fame — and
Hollywood-level promotion — by mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic.

This small cell of regime change
specialists was operating according to the theories of the late Gene
Sharp, the so-called “Clausewitz of non-violent struggle.” Sharp had
worked with a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Col. Robert Helvey,
to conceive a strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of
hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington’s unipolar
domination.

Otpor at the 1998 MTV Europe Music Awards

Otpor was supported by the National
Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute.
Sinisa Sikman, one of Otpor’s main trainers, once said the group even received direct CIA funding.

According to a leaked email
from a Stratfor staffer, after running Milosevic out of power, “the
kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other
words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of
color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and
basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic
governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor revealed that CANVAS “turned
its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition
movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern
Europe.

While monitoring the CANVAS training
program, Stratfor outlined its insurrectionist agenda in strikingly
blunt language: “Success is by no means guaranteed, and student
movements are only at the beginning of what could be a years-long effort
to trigger a revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are
the people who cut their teeth on the ‘Butcher of the Balkans.’ They’ve
got mad skills. When you see students at five Venezuelan universities
hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is
over and the real work has begun.”

Birthing the “Generation 2007” regime change cadre

The “real work” began two years
later, in 2007, when Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic
University of Caracas. He moved to Washington, DC to enroll in the
Governance and Political Management Program
at George Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan
economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American
neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who spent more than a decade
working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime
that was ousted by Chávez.

That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to
to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). This privately
owned station played a leading role in the 2002 coup against Hugo
Chávez. RCTV helped mobilize anti-government demonstrators, falsified
information blaming government supporters for acts of violence carried
out by opposition members, and banned pro-government reporting amid the
coup. The role of RCTV and other oligarch-owned stations in driving the
failed coup attempt was chronicled in the acclaimed documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

That same year, the students claimed credit for stymying Chavez’s constitutional referendum for a “21st century socialism” that promised
“to set the legal framework for the political and social reorganization
of the country, giving direct power to organized communities as a
prerequisite for the development of a new economic system.”

From the protests around RCTV and the
referendum, a specialized cadre of US-backed class of regime change
activists was born. They called themselves “Generation 2007.”

The Stratfor and CANVAS trainers of
this cell identified Guaidó’s ally – a libertarian political organizer
named Yon Goicoechea – as a “key factor” in defeating the constitutional
referendum. The following year, Goicochea was rewarded
for his efforts with the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for
Advancing Liberty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly
invested into his political network.

Friedman, of course, was the
godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported
into Chile by dictatorial junta leader Augusto Pinochet to implement
policies of radical “shock doctrine”-style fiscal austerity. And the
Cato Institute is the libertarian Washington DC-based think tank founded
by the Koch Brothers, two top Republican Party donors who have become aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin America.

Wikileaks published a 2007 email
from American ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield sent to the
State Department, National Security Council and Department of Defense
Southern Command praising “Generation of ’07” for having “forced the
Venezuelan president, accustomed to setting the political agenda, to
(over)react.” Among the “emerging leaders” Brownfield identified were
Freddy Guevara and Yon Goicoechea. He applauded the latter figure as
“one of the students’ most articulate defenders of civil liberties.”

Flush with cash from libertarian
oligarchs and US government soft power outfits, the radical Venezuelan
cadre took their Otpor tactics to the streets, along with a version of the group’s logo, as seen below:

“Galvanizing public unrest…to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez”

In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists staged their most provocative demonstration
yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the outrageous
guerrilla theater tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime change
manuals. The protesters had mobilized against the arrest of an ally from
another newfangled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group
“gathered funds from a variety of US government sources, which allowed
it to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street
movements,” according to academic George Ciccariello-Maher’s book,
“Building the Commune.”

While video of the protest is not available, many Venezuelans have identified
Guaidó as one of its key participants. While the allegation is
unconfirmed, it is certainly plausible; the bare-buttocks protesters
were members of the Generation 2007 inner core that Guaidó belonged to,
and were clad in their trademark Resistencia! Venezuela t-shirts, as
seen below:

Is this the ass that Trump wants to install in Venezuela’s seat of power?

That year, Guaidó exposed himself to
the public in another way, founding a political party to capture the
anti-Chavez energy his Generation 2007 had cultivated. Called Popular
Will, it was led by Leopoldo López,
a Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand heavily involved in National
Endowment for Democracy programs and elected as the mayor of a district
in Caracas that was one of the wealthiest in the country. Lopez was a
portrait of Venezuelan aristocracy, directly descended from his
country’s first president. He was also the first cousin of Thor Halvorssen,
founder of the US-based Human Rights Foundation that functions as a de
facto publicity shop for US-backed anti-government activists in
countries targeted by Washington for regime change.

Though Lopez’s interests aligned neatly with Washington’s, US diplomatic cables
published by Wikileaks highlighted the fanatical tendencies that would
ultimately lead to Popular Will’s marginalization. One cable identified
Lopez as “a divisive figure
within the opposition… often described as arrogant, vindictive, and
power-hungry.” Others highlighted his obsession with street
confrontations and his “uncompromising approach” as a source of tension
with other opposition leaders who prioritized unity and participation in
the country’s democratic institutions.

Popular Will founder Leopoldo Lopez cruising with his wife, Lilian Tintori

By 2010, Popular Will and its foreign
backers moved to exploit the worst drought to hit Venezuela in decades.
Massive electricity shortages had struck the country due the dearth of
water, which was needed to power hydroelectric plants. A global economic
recession and declining oil prices compounded the crisis, driving
public discontentment.

Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical plan
to drive a dagger through the heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The
scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country’s electrical system by as
early as April 2010.

“This could be the watershed event,
as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the
failure of that system,” the Stratfor internal memo declared. “This
would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that
no opposition group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time,
an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the
situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

By this point, the Venezuelan
opposition was receiving a staggering $40-50 million a year from US
government organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for
Democracy, according to a report
by the Spanish think tank, the FRIDE Institute. It also had massive
wealth to draw on from its own accounts, which were mostly outside the
country.

While the scenario envisioned by
Statfor did not come to fruition, the Popular Will party activists and
their allies cast aside any pretense of non-violence and joined a
radical plan to destabilize the country.

Towards violent destabilization

In November, 2010, according to emails
obtained by Venezuelan security services and presented by former
Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and
several other student activists attended a secret five-day training at a
hotel dubbed “Fiesta Mexicana” hotel in Mexico. The sessions were run
by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US
government. The meeting had reportedly received the blessing
of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George
W. Bush’s Department of State, and the right-wing former Colombian
President Alvaro Uribe.

Inside the meetings, the emails
stated, Guaidó and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow
President Hugo Chavez by generating chaos through protracted spasms of
street violence.

Three petroleum industry figureheads –
Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and Pedro Burelli – allegedly covered the
$52,000 tab to hold the meeting. Torrar is a self-described “human
rights activist” and “intellectual” whose younger brother Reynaldo Tovar
Arroyo is the representative in Venezuela of the private Mexican oil
and gas company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds a contract with the
Venezuelan state.

Cedeño, for his part, is a fugitive
Venezuelan businessman who claimed asylum in the United States, and
Pedro Burelli a former JP Morgan executive and the former director of
Venezuela’s national oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA). He
left PDVSA in 1998 as Hugo Chavez took power and is on the advisory committee of Georgetown University’s Latin America Leadership Program.

Burelli insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been fabricated and even hired a private investigator to prove it. The investigator declared that Google’s records showed the emails alleged to be his were never transmitted.

Yet today Burelli makes no secret of
his desire to see Venezuela’s current president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed
– and even dragged through the streets and sodomized with a bayonet, as
Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was by NATO-backed militiamen.

Update:Burelli contacted the Grayzone after the
publication of this article to clarify his participation in the “Fiesta
Mexicana” plot.

Burelli called the meeting “a legitimate activity that took place in a hotel by a different name” in Mexico.

Asked if OTPOR coordinated the meeting, he would only state that
he “likes” the work of OTPOR/CANVAS and while not a funder of it, has
“recommended activists from different countries to track them and
participate in the activities they conduct in various countries.”

Burelli added: “The Einstein Institute trained thousands openly
in Venezuela. Gene Sharpe’s philosophy was widely studied and embraced.
And this has probably kept the struggle from turning into a civil war.”

The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan revealed in a series of documents
produced by the Venezuelan government. In May 2014, Caracas released
documents detailing an assassination plot against President Nicolás
Maduro. The leaks identified the anti-Chavez hardliner Maria Corina
Machado – today the main asset of Sen. Marco Rubio – as a leader of the
scheme. The founder of the National Endowment for Democracy-funded
group, Sumate, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for
the opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.

Machado and George W. Bush, 2005

“I think it is time to gather
efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain financing to annihilate
Maduro and the rest will fall apart,” Machado wrote in an email to
former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria in 2014.

In another email,
Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing of US Ambassador
to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. “I have already made up my mind and this
fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver to
our friends in the world. If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself
before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed
his support and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook
stronger than the regime’s to break the international security ring.”

Guaidó heads to the barricades

That February, student demonstrators
acting as shock troops for the exiled oligarchy erected violent
barricades across the country, turning opposition-controlled quarters
into violent fortresses known as guarimbas.
While international media portrayed the upheaval as a spontaneous
protest against Maduro’s iron-fisted rule, there was ample evidence that
Popular Will was orchestrating the show.

“None
of the protesters at the universities wore their university t-shirts,
they all wore Popular Will or Justice First t-shirts,” a guarimba participant said
at the time. “They might have been student groups, but the student
councils are affiliated to the political opposition parties and they are
accountable to them.”

Asked who the ringleaders were, the guarimba participant said, “Well if I am totally honest, those guys are legislators now.”

Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas. Three years later, they erupted again, causing mass destruction of public infrastructure, the murder of government supporters, and the deaths of 126 people, many of whom were Chavistas. In several cases, supporters of the government were burned alive by armed gangs.

Guaidó was directly involved in the 2014 guarimbas.
In fact, he tweeted video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas
mask, surrounded by masked and armed elements that had shut down a
highway that were engaging in a violent clash with the police. Alluding
to his participation in Generation 2007, he proclaimed, “I remember in
2007, we proclaimed, ‘Students!’ Now, we shout, ‘Resistance!
Resistance!’”

Guaidó has deleted the tweet, demonstrating apparent concern for his image as a champion of democracy.

On February 12, 2014, during the height of that year’s guarimbas, Guaidó joined Lopez on stage at a rally of Popular Will and Justice First. During a lengthy diatribe
against the government, Lopez urged the crowd to march to the office of
Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Soon after, Diaz’s office came
under attack by armed gangs who attempted to burn it to the ground. She
denounced what she called “planned and premeditated violence.”

Guaido alongside Lopez at the fateful February 12, 2014 rally

In an televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó dismissed deaths resulting from guayas – a guarimba
tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway in order to
injure or kill motorcyclists – as a “myth.” His comments whitewashed a
deadly tactic that had killed unarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and decapitated a man named Elvis Durán, among many others.

This callous disregard for human life
would define his Popular Will party in the eyes of much of the public,
including many opponents of Maduro.

Cracking down on Popular Will

As violence and political
polarization escalated across the country, the government began to act
against the Popular Will leaders who helped stoke it.

Freddy Guevara, the National Assembly
Vice-President and second in command of Popular Will, was a principal
leader in the 2017 street riots. Facing a trial for his role in the
violence, Guevara took shelter in the Chilean embassy, where he remains.

Lester Toledo, a Popular Will
legislator from the state of Zulia, was wanted by Venezuelan government
in September 2016 on charges of financing terrorism and plotting
assassinations. The plans were said to be made with former Colombian
President Álavaro Uribe. Toledo escaped Venezuela and went on several
speaking tours with Human Rights Watch, the US government-backed Freedom
House, the Spanish Congress and European Parliament.

Carlos Graffe, another Otpor-trained Generation 2007 member who led Popular Will, was arrested
in July 2017. According to police, he was in possession of a bag filled
with nails, C4 explosives and a detonator. He was released on December
27, 2017.

Leopoldo Lopez, the longtime Popular Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 people during the guarimbas in 2014. Amnesty International lauded
Lopez as a “prisoner of conscience” and slammed his transfer from
prison to house as “not good enough.” Meanwhile, family members of guarimba victims introduced a petition for more charges against Lopez.

Yon Goicoechea, the Koch Brothers posterboy, was arrested in 2016 by security forces who claimed they found found a kilo of explosives in his vehicle. In a New York Times op-ed, Goicoechea protested the charges as “trumped-up” and claimed he had been imprisoned simply for his “dream of a democratic society, free of Communism.” He was freed in November 2017.

David Smolansky, also a member of the
original Otpor-trained Generation 2007, became Venezuela’s
youngest-ever mayor when he was elected in 2013 in the affluent suburb
of El Hatillo. But he was stripped of his position and sentenced to 15
months in prison by the Supreme Court after it found him culpable of
stirring the violent guarimbas.

Facing arrest, Smolansky shaved his beard, donned sunglasses and slipped into Brazil
disguised as a priest with a bible in hand and rosary around his neck.
He now lives in Washington, DC, where he was hand picked by Secretary of
the Organization of American States Luis Almagro to lead the working
group on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis.

This July 26, Smolansky held what he called a “cordial reunion” with Elliot Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra felon installed by Trump
as special US envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is notorious for overseeing
the US covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980’s
in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. His lead role in the
Venezuelan coup has stoked fears that another blood-drenched proxy war
might be on the way.

Four days earlier, Machado rumbled another violent threat against Maduro, declaring that if he “wants to save his life, he should understand that his time is up.”

A pawn in their game

The collapse of Popular Will under
the weight of the violent campaign of destabilization it ran alienated
large sectors of the public and wound much of its leadership up in exile
or in custody. Guaidó had remained a relatively minor figure, having
spent most of his nine-year career in the National Assembly as an
alternate deputy. Hailing from one of Venezuela’s least populous states,
Guaidó came in second place
during the 2015 parliamentary elections, winning just 26% of votes cast
in order to secure his place in the National Assembly. Indeed, his bottom may have been better known than his face.

Guaidó is known as the president of
the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but he was never elected to
the position. The four opposition parties that comprised the Assembly’s
Democratic Unity Table had decided to establish a rotating presidency.
Popular Will’s turn was on the way, but its founder, Lopez, was under
house arrest. Meanwhile, his second-in-charge, Guevara, had taken refuge
in the Chilean embassy. A figure named Juan Andrés Mejía would have
been next in line but reasons that are only now clear, Juan Guaido was
selected.

“There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidó’s rise,” Sequera, the Venezuelan analyst, observed. “Mejía
is high class, studied at one of the most expensive private
universities in Venezuela, and could not be easily marketed to the
public the way Guaidó could. For one, Guaidó has common mestizo
features like most Venezuelans do, and seems like more like a man of
the people. Also, he had not been overexposed in the media, so he could
be built up into pretty much anything.”

In December 2018, Guaidó sneaked
across the border and junketed to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to
coordinate the plan to hold mass demonstrations during the inauguration
of President Maduro. The night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony,
both Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia
Freeland called Guaidó to affirm their support.

A week later, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen.
Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all lawmakers from the Florida
base of the right-wing Cuban exile lobby – joined President Trump and
Vice President Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared himself president, he would back him.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met
personally withGuaidó on January 10, according to the Wall Street
Journal. However, Pompeo could not pronounce Guaidó’s name when he
mentioned him in a press briefing on January 25, referring to him as
“Juan Guido.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just called the
figure Washington is attempting to install as Venezuelan President “Juan
*Guido*” – as in the racist term for Italians. America’s top diplomat
didn’t even bother to learn how to pronounce his puppet’s name. pic.twitter.com/HsanZXuSPR

By January 11, Guaidó’s Wikipedia page had been edited
37 times, highlighting the struggle to shape the image of a previously
anonymous figure who was now a tableau for Washington’s regime change
ambitions. In the end, editorial oversight of his page was handed over
to Wikipedia’s elite council of “librarians,” who pronounced him the
“contested” president of Venezuela.

Guaidó might have been an obscure
figure, but his combination of radicalism and opportunism satisfied
Washington’s needs. “That internal piece was missing,” a Trump
administration said of Guaidó. “He was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete.”

“For the first time,” Brownfield, the former American ambassador to Venezuela, gushed to
the New York Times, “you have an opposition leader who is clearly
signaling to the armed forces and to law enforcement that he wants to
keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys.”

But Guaidó’s Popular Will party formed the shock troops of the guarimbas
that caused the deaths of police officers and common citizens alike. He
had even boasted of his own participation in street riots. And now, to
win the hearts and minds of the military and police, Guaido had to erase
this blood-soaked history.

On January 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó’s wife delivered a video address
calling on the military to rise up against Maduro. Her performance was
wooden and uninspiring, underscoring the her husband’s limited political
prospects.

At a press conference before supporters four days later, Guaidó announced his solution to the crisis: “Authorize a humanitarian intervention!”

While he waits on direct assistance,
Guaidó remains what he has always been – a pet project of cynical
outside forces. “It doesn’t matter if he crashes and burns after all
these misadventures,” Sequera said of the coup figurehead. “To the
Americans, he is expendable.”

Max Blumenthalis an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza.
Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light
on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions.

Dan
Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed
video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is
a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.